Tackling Inequalities in Healthcare: Practical Solutions to Ensure Access to Affordable Care

Dear Colleagues,

Healthcare inequalities remain a major global challenge, affecting not only access to timely, affordable, and appropriate care, but also the quality of care received and the health outcomes experienced by individuals and communities. Socio-economic disadvantage, ethnicity, geography, age, disability, and structural barriers within healthcare organizations and systems continue to shape patterns of exclusion, delayed treatment, poorer patient experiences, and unequal outcomes across diverse populations and settings. As health systems face increasing pressures, there is an urgent need for practical, evidence-informed solutions that can reduce disparities and improve both access and outcomes.

This Special Issue aims to advance scholarship and practice on healthcare inequalities by bringing together research that examines barriers to affordable care, the consequences of unequal access for health and patient outcomes, and organization-, provider-, community-, and system-level responses designed to address these challenges. The topic aligns closely with the scope of healthcare, particularly with healthcare organizations, systems, and providers.

Original research articles and reviews are welcome. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, access to primary and secondary care, financial barriers to treatment, culturally responsive services, healthcare workforce and service delivery challenges, digital exclusion, patient experiences, health system reforms, and evidence-based interventions to improve equity in care access and outcomes.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Muhammad Zakir Hossain
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.